Steele Dossier Archives - Bookworm Room

Time For A Reckoning Against The Anti-Trump Coup Leaders

August 5, 2019 by Wolf Howling Leave a Comment

If we are to remain a nation of laws, then the people who manifestly engineered a coup against duly elected President Trump need to be called to account.

Can you believe that it is 2019 and Trump has, to this moment at least, survived a coup attempt? I did not expect him to survive the onslaught. He has to be the cleanest President we’ve ever had in office. He just survived a three year investigatory equivalent of a general warrant to search anywhere for any crime — something the Bill of Rights made unlawful on December 15, 1791.

Unlike a criminal investigation, which benefits from Constitutional limits and protections, things were different for Trump. Beginning on July 31, 2016, when the FBI launched an investigation explicitly aimed at Trump — and right through and including the Mueller investigation, likewise explicitly aimed at Trump, — every aspect of Trump’s life, his businesses, and finances his finances was pried open under the rubric of a “counter-intelligence investigation.” That he is clean as a whistle is obvious, for we know that, had the FBI or the Mueller team found anything that could be cast as a crime, whether related to Russia or not, they would have used it to destroy Trump. After all, Mueller’s team, while pursuing their Russia counter-intelligence investigation, used evidence about fraud regarding taxi medallions, something far removed from Mueller’s mandate, to prosecute Michael Cohen.

Anti-Trump actors in the government leaked top-secret information from NSA wiretaps to the press. Mueller’s team metaphorically raped people around Trump — including Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos and Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen — to get them to give some evidence that Trump committed crimes. The Mueller investigative team actively solicited testimony adverse to Trump, unethically and seemingly without regard to whether true or false. Trump’s personal attorney was subject to a SWAT-style raid, as was Roger Stone when his arrest played out for all on CNN. At least one person, Carter Page, was subject to four separate FISA warrants — and under the two hop rule, we can safely assume that means Trump and his inner circle were spied upon as part and parcel of that warrant as well. They were spied upon under four FISA Warrants for an entire year, beginning in October 2016 and concluding in September 2017. Indeed, it is hard not to conclude that they were the real target, with Carter Page merely a convenient patsy. Strikingly, despite this total warfare, when it came to Trump, Mueller and Co. produced . . . nothing.

There is no predicate in American law or history for any of this, whether the FBI’s counter-intelligence investigation aimed at Trump, the FISA warrants, or the way in which the DOJ unlawfully authorized Mueller to conduct a criminal investigation under the guise and rules of a counter-intelligence investigation. That is, this did not start with a crime that called for an investigation. This started with an elected president whom Washington insiders both feared and disdained and they used the investigation in the hopes that they could find a crime. The only predicate to this approach can be found in the Soviet Union’s Levrentiy Beria, who famously said, “Show me the man, I’ll find the crime.” It was an abuse aimed at finding anything in Trump’s activities that could force him from office or, during the duration of the investigation, get him to make a mistake, then force him from office on a process crime.

It’s this unconstitutional, Soviet-style, bass-ackwards bullshit that allows Mueller to claim before Congress that there’s meaning to the fact that he has not not proven Trump innocent of obstruction. As others have pointed out, Mueller also failed to exonerate Trump of assassinating Lincoln). And thus do we now have half of the progressive Congresscritters calling for Trump’s impeachment on the grounds that Trump obstructed an investigation . . . that Mueller says was never “curtailed, stopped or hindered” . . . for a crime or crimes . . . that neither Trump nor anyone in his administration committed.

Folks, this is a top-down, engineered coup to overturn the 2016 election. It is not enough that the coup be defeated. We need the disinfectant of sunshine — to make public every single aspect of this attempted coup. And then we need heads on pikes, metaphorically, and people in prison, for real. Fīat jūstitia ruat cælum. Let justice be done though the heavens fall.

To that end, these are the questions I believe need to be answered: [Read more…]

The collusion and obstruction investigation indicts others, not Trump

May 6, 2019 by Wolf Howling Leave a Comment

Officially, Mueller investigated Trump’s alleged collusion and obstruction. We now know that there was collusion and obstruction — but not by Trump.

The investigation into Trump’s campaign began with the ludicrous hearsay (in some cases, multiple levels of hearsay) allegations compiled by Michael Steele, paid for by the DNC, provided to the FBI before the 2016 election, and briefed to every major media outlet as part of an “October surprise” that failed to derail Trump. It is worth quickly reviewing what those allegations were. To summarize the charges in the original Buzzfeed “report”:

Trump was a Russian intelligence asset who had been working for Russian intelligence for at least seven years.
Trump, who had no business interests in Russia, was being paid in Russian prostitutes for his services.
Russian intelligence has a tape of Trump inviting prostitutes to his hotel room during the 2013 Miss Universe contest held in Moscow and so they could perform a “golden shower” on the bed.
Trump was handling the payment of Russian assets in New York through a complicated money laundering scheme.
Trump coordinated with Russian intelligence through Paul Manafort, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and his private attorney, Michael Cohen.
Carter Page’s business trip to Russia in 2016 was cover for a meeting with Russian intelligence.
The Trump campaign coordinated with Russia for the release of DNC emails hacked by Russian intelligence. Papadopoulos admitted to knowing this information in near real time, before it was made public by the DNC.
Michael Cohen was subject to Russian influence through his Russian wife (she is not Russian, by the way). Cohen traveled to Prague to coordinate with Russian intel on behalf of Trump once Russian involvement in the campaign became public knowledge.

All involved denied those allegations. Moreover, Mueller’s $30 million-plus, two year-plus investigation either affirmatively disproved them or was unable to find any facts that might prove them. None are supported in the Mueller Report. And indeed, Mueller makes only passing reference to the Steele Dossier.

Now recall that, once it became apparent that the Steele Dossier did not provide probable cause for anything, because all of its wild allegations were affirmatively false or incapable of proof, a story appeared in the NYT on Dec. 30, 2017, based on a leak, that the investigation was warranted because Papadopoulos in fact knew of the theft of DNC emails before that theft was made public.

There’s only one problem with the NYT’s “bombshell of the moment”: Reviewing the FBI affidavit that supports charging Papadopoulos with the crime of lying to investigators, it is readily apparent that Papadopoulos had said nothing at all that tied the hacked DNC emails to Russia. As I wrote at the time, anyone paying attention to the Hillary email scandal suspected that Hillary’s emails had long before been hacked by foreign intelligence from her time as Secretary of State. [Read more…]

Spying On Trump & A Progressive Game of Semantics

April 13, 2019 by Wolf Howling Leave a Comment

Proggie congresscritters claim to be shocked at charges about Obama administration “spying” on team Trump. Given the public record, that is itself shocking.

This from the Blaze (internal links omitted):

At a hearing before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) asked Barr about a team he had indicated the day before that he was putting together to investigate the FBI’s handling of its Russia probe during the 2016 campaign, prior to the appointment of a special counsel. After President Donald Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey in 2017, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed special counsel Robert Mueller to head an independent investigation that would be separate “from the normal chain of command.”

Barr responded that he planned on “reviewing both the genesis and the conduct of intelligence activities directed against — at the Trump campaign during 2016.” He said he wanted to “pull together all the information from the various investigations that have gone on, including on the Hill, and in the department, and see if there are any remaining questions to be addressed.”

Shaheen asked Barr why he thought this was necessary.

Roll the tape:

It is shocking indeed that the left would try to defend the FBI, CIA and DOJ on the factually ludicrous claim that none of the agencies were involved in “spying” on Trump, whether before or after the November 2016 election. The public record is replete with the facts that show they targeted Trump, his campaign and then his administration. [Read more…]

Random thoughts on the unfolding Russia Collusion hoax

April 12, 2019 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

With Barr promising to investigate the Russia Collusion Hoax, it’s a good time to think about the motivations driving those who masterminded the hoax.

Yesterday was another day spent pulling out ivy, a process I found so exhausting, I couldn’t write last night. Not writing, though, doesn’t mean not thinking. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Russia collusion hoax, especially about what drove the major actors to do what they did. After all, even if they thought the risk was minimal because they were banking on a Hillary victory and doing their best to ensure that victory, the power players knew that what they were doing was both illegal and immoral. That’s a pretty big hurdle for otherwise law-abiding people to make.

To get to my answer, I’ll start by looking at what they did (and mine is a slightly different focus than most others), and then I’ll try to answer the question about what powered these people’s engines. Here goes….

I suspect that several of you, like me, remember the Watergate scandal. For any of you young’uns reading this, way back in 1972, while acting on behalf of Nixon and his innermost circle, a bunch of former government operatives broke into Democrat National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex to steal information related to the election.

To give what they did some context, the equivalent act would be for some former 49er football players, acting at the behest of the current coach to break into Seattle Seahawk headquarters to steal the coaching book for the upcoming football season. It’s an aggressive form of cheating in the midst of a fiercely fought rivalry.

With that in mind, we can see that there are some parallels to Watergate in the Russia collusion hoax and some things that differ wildly. It’s easiest to start with the obvious difference, which is that the Russia Collusion scandal did not involve outsiders acting only once to steal a playbook. Instead, it involved permanent government employees embedded deeply in our entire security apparatus — the FBI, CIA, and DOJ — working in concert for months. Watergate was kindergarten and this was post-graduate work.

Moreover, unlike Watergate, after Trump was elected, this collusion scandal morphed into a full-blown government coup intended to take down a duly elected American president. That the Left — from the DNC, to the media, to the people down the block from me — looks upon this complacently instead of with horror tells you that the Left no longer has any allegiance to America, American values, or the Constitution. Every Leftist, no matter where situated, is enthusiastically embracing tin-pot banana republic tyranny. There are no words for how sad and how dangerous this is.

Interestingly, though, I haven’t heard anyone articulate what information these bad actors were seeking in the run-up to the election. I know this sounds like a stupid observation, and it may well be. The obvious answer is that these bad actors were seeking evidence of Russian collusion in order to create an October surprise that would bring down Trump’s candidacy.

The thing is, though, that you and I know that, while a few true believers may actually have thought that Trump and/or people within his inner circle were working in concert with Putin, the reality is that the big bad actors — Comey, Brennan, Clapper, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Priestap, etc. — knew perfectly well that there was no collusion. They knew this because (so far as we know) the only proof they could bring to the FISA court to justify spying on Trump was the Steele dossier. [Read more…]

Bookworm Beat 12/18/18 — the new car edition and open thread

December 18, 2018 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

This Bookworm Beat isn’t actually about new cars. It’s about the Steele Dossier, Islamic terrorism, crazy California, Europe’s coming collapse, & much more.

No, I don’t have a new car, but I need one soon. I want a small SUV with all-wheel drive. My current top contenders are the Subaru Crosstrek and the Mazda CX-5.

If you have opinions or information about either of those cars, or about comparable cars, I’m all ears. I’ve already spent time researching and driving the two cars, but I’m somewhat frozen, as is always the case for me before a big expenditure. That freeze seemed to extend to blogging today, but I’m ready to go now.

We always knew it, but know Steele confirms it. It’s been obvious for a long time that the whole Steele dossier, complete with unverified, and impossible to verify, scandalous information about Trump, was a fake. We also learned that Hillary paid for it. For the first time, though, I think Christopher Steele has stated, under oath, precisely why Hillary paid for it:

British ex-spy Christopher Steele, who wrote the Democrat-financed anti-Trump dossier, said in a court case that he was hired by a Democratic law firm in preparation for Hillary Clinton challenging the results of the 2016 presidential election.

He said the law firm Perkins Coie wanted to be in a position to contest the results based on evidence he unearthed on the Trump campaign conspiring with Moscow on election interference.

Let me rephrase that: Hillary paid money for a British man to collude with the Russians by introducing to America disinformation intended to bring down a properly elected American president. Somehow the mainstream media keeps missing the biggest scandal in the history of American elections.

Oakland Muslim assures everyone it was a joke. Sometimes we’re told that murderous Muslims are insane . . . and sometimes we’re told that they have senses of humor so deep and refined that ordinary people just can’t understand them when they joke about killing 10,000 people in the Bay Area and, in fact, try to work with ISIS to make it happen: [Read more…]

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Trump: the Russia collusion story needs to end soon

February 13, 2018 by Wolf Howling 13 Comments

Available facts indicate that the Progressives’ Russia Collusion narrative is fake — and time is running out to investigate the true Clinton/FBI collusion.

With questions swirling around the Trump-Russian collusion narrative, we seem to be living in a John le Carré novel. It is one full of spies where the truth is hidden deep beneath disinformation and, ironically enough, behind security protocols. And just like a le Carré novel, it seems that there are many people in this mix determined that the truth should never see the light of day.

Is Trump a Russian intelligence asset with a taste for Russian prostitutes and golden showers who stole the 2016 election with help from Russia? Perhaps. But given the dearth of evidence supporting that contention after twenty months of investigation, another, better question arises: Is the Trump Russia collusion narrative the single most dirty — and criminal — trick in the history of American politics? It would be intellectually dishonest in the extreme to say that only one of those questions deserves investigation.

Was the Russian collusion narrative started, then spoon fed to the FBI and the media, as a way to make Hillary seem less corrupt in comparison to Trump during the 2016 election campaign? Was the narrative then pushed as hard as possible after the election as a way to delegitimize the Trump presidency; to serve as a vehicle to overturn the 2016 election results, and to protect people in government who had acted unethically, and perhaps criminally, as regards all things Hillary — i.e., those responsible for the criminal travesty that was the FBI/DOJ investigation and exoneration of Hillary for her email scandal, those who allowed the Uranium One deal to be approved without notifying Congress of related Russian corruption, and those DOJ officials who defied the recommendations of FBI field agents to open an investigation of the Clinton Foundation?

Let me note here, before you start measuring me for a tin-foil hat, I am not alleging some grand conspiracy involving the FBI, CIA, ODNI, and others. If this was a political dirty trick, then the truth is likely being held in a death-grip of secrecy among a handful of conspirators, they most likely being no more than one or two people in the leadership of the DNC and Clinton Campaigns, perhaps CIA Director John Brennan and/or Glen Simpson of Fusion GPS, and/or Christopher Steele. As to everyone else who then picked up this narrative and ran with it, sometimes unlawfully, that was not a conspiracy. Far more likely it simply grew out of the partisan culture created throughout the government agencies by the Obama administration. That culture, as Ms. BWR has fairly described it, is one of bias, entitlement, arrogance, and corruption, at least to the extent that ideological ends have at times justified patently unlawful means. I believe Ms. BWR’s description also covers about 90% of the mainstream media as well.

Just to review, there are precious few factual allegations regarding the Trump Russia collusion narrative beyond the bald allegation that Trump was a Russian asset, a narrative Fusion’s Glen Simpson claims was known all over Moscow and was just there for the picking in June 2016. People were “talking about it freely.” (Sen. p87-88). Amazing that Simpson and Steele were able to uncover that in a week whereas the CIA and NSA were blissfully ignorant during the eight years that Trump is alleged to have acted as a Russian agent, eh?

The people Steele names as active in the Russia Trump collusion are Carter Page, Paul Manafort, and Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen. Steele mentions Michael Flynn, but only in passing as someone the Kremlin was cultivating. Steele alludes to two others, someone in the Trump campaign who “admitt[ed that the] Kremlin [was] behind [the] recent appearance of DNC emails on Wikileaks,” later claimed to be George Papadopoulos, and someone “close” to Trump who knew of his intelligence relationship with Russia, later asserted to be Sergei Millian.

As to specific acts alleged by Steele, there are only four that directly relate to Trump (at least by my count, ten by count of the Washington Times). The first specific act alleged is that Trump engaged Russian hookers to do a golden shower in his Moscow hotel room in 2013. The second is that Carter Page traveled to Russia in order to meet Igor Sechin, President of Rosneft, and a Russian political official, Diveykin. The third is that George Papadopoulos admitted to knowing that Russia was behind the DNC Wikileaks affair. And the fourth is that Michael Cohen met in Prague with Russian officials in the last week of August or first week of September. [Read more…]

The House Intelligence Memo and The Steele Dossier

February 2, 2018 by Wolf Howling 7 Comments

The Memo shows the FBI and DOJ lying to spy on an opposition presidential candidate and it undermines the entire rationale for the Mueller investigation.

The House Intel Memo (the “memo”) is out. It contains some bombshells:

One, several of the top people at the FBI and the DOJ, using both lies of omission and commission, falsified applications for FISA warrants to use on Carter Page, a member of Trump’s campaign team. As a general matter, falsifying a warrant does not lead to criminal liability for government officers, but the situation is rightly different when it comes to getting a warrant for NSA intercepts. The NSA’s capabilities and intercept database are mind-bogglingly extensive and they sweep up uncountable conversations involving innocent Americans. If actors in our government, relying on the cloak of secrecy that covers FISA court actions, ever decided to misuse the NSA’s capabilities to target political enemies, they could turn our nation overnight from a democratic republic into something akin to a police state. Congress therefore established criminal penalties for misusing NSA capabilities (50 U.S.C. § 1809) and created a special FISA Court to protect against such misuse. The people responsible for signing those FISA warrants are James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates, Dana Boente and Rod Rosenstein. That last name adds some complications, obviously.

Two, a person can infer from the memo that those warrants did not result in any useful information. Otherwise Mueller & Co. would long since have brought charges would against Carter Page and / or the NSA warrants would be ongoing.

Three, the fact that the Steele Dossier, rather than independently developed or corroborated facts, was the basis for a finding of probable cause to get a FISA warrant calls throws into stark relief the question of whether Rod Rosenstein acted lawfully when he appointed Robert Mueller to conduct an intelligence, not a criminal investigation. On that same basis, if there’s no reason to believe that the FBI independently corroborated facts sufficient to make a probable cause finding about some anomalous Trump/Russian conclusion “crime,” then how can there possibly be an investigation into an obstruction of justice charge?

Four, before going into detail on the memo, John Hinderaker at Powerline raises an excellent point about what’s missing from the memo: [Read more…]

The true tale of the Steele Dossier and the Russia Conspiracy

January 31, 2018 by Wolf Howling 10 Comments

New facts show that the so-called Russia conspiracy was in fact a product of savvy Russians and credulous, willing, and very dishonest Democrat operatives.

This Trump-Russia collusion narrative is looking more and more like an incredibly intelligent mix of publicly available facts wrapped around some damning pieces of knowing slanders and fictions, all of which were then given the imprimatur of verisimilitude by attaching a retired British spy, Christopher Steele’s name to the whole misbegotten mess. None of the damning pieces have been proven, though several key bits have been disproven. Edward Jay Epstein recently opined at Powerline that the Steele Dossier, to the extent it seems to contain actual information from Russian sources, seems to contain Russian curated disinformation at best.

I am rapidly concluding that the Dossier may represent more than Russian meddling. Certainly Russia meddled. That’s what it does. But in this case, it seems to have gotten some help on the home front. There are far too many coincidences, far too many things that don’t make sense, and in several cases, dogs that don’t bark, for me to believe that, within America’s borders, those working on the Steele Dossier assembled it in good faith as honest, genuine investigatory work. It might be, but that is not the direction in which the known undisputed facts point at the moment.

In addition to reading this post, I recommend you read two other things. The first is Victor Davis Hanson’s article, Hillary’s “sure” victory explains most everything. The second is my post briefly explaining FISA and the questions that the FBI and DOJ have yet to answer about abusing FISA in the Trump-Russia matter. Both will help make sense of the events of the past two years and the tale I tell below.

In the coming days, I will also publish a detailed timeline listing all the relevant events and explaining why many of the key ones are problematic. It is very long. Before throwing you into that deep end, this post simplifies the timeline narrative and lets you see most of the major the issues without having to hack your way through the . . . I would say weeds, but it really is a triple-canopy jungle.

This post, relying on the facts set out in my soon-to-be-published timeline, gives you an insight into what was going on in the Hillary campaign. You’ll see that the evolving Trump-Russia narrative dovetailed perfectly with the struggle Hillary’s campaign had to overturn voters’ firm conviction that it was impossible for anyone to be more corrupt than Hillary.

So, with that preamble, let me ask you to step back in time and pretend you’re a top political operative in the DNC Now, close your eyes and make spooky noises as you travel back through slime, time and space. When you open your eyes, you see that the calendar on the wall shows that today is April 30, 2016.

April 30 . . . and your gal, Hillary Clinton, is tapped as a shoe-in for the nomination. And looking at the crowded Republican primary field, you know it’s a hop, skip and a jump from nomination to her walk on a red carpet, showered with a glittering combination of male tear drops and fragments of glass from the broken ceiling, as she heads to her coronation . . . uh, inauguration.

It’s a beautiful vision. But in the meantime, something has gone wrong. Very wrong.

Now, don’t misunderstand — not everything has gone wrong. The DNC is an arm of Clinton, Inc., bought and paid for, and it is doing her bidding. The DNC has stacked the primary deck in her favor and Hillary has virtually all the super-delegates in her bag.

The MSM is on her side and is pushing Donald Trump’s nomination on the theory that he will be her weakest opponent, Donald Trump. The MSM’s work seems to have paid off, as it is becoming ever more apparent that Trump is going to win the Republican nomination. All of that is great . . . but there are still a few irritants preventing you from reveling in the moment.

The main irritant is that Hillary is still on the ropes with the public for the email scandal that was first exposed almost a year ago. And worse, that public — including all those darn Deplorables — will get to vote for President in six months.

These likely voters know that Hillary, while Secretary of State, put tens of thousands of America’s secrets at risk by running them through an unsecured private server, the entire purpose of which was to thwart Congressional investigations and watchdog groups, something itself completely illegal. (This particular irritant, incidentally, if proven can be punished with 20 years in prison and a ban on ever again holding public office – which may explain why Comey didn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole when he exonerated Hillary on 5 July.) The Russians and every other American competitor and enemy, from China to Iran to the fat boy in Pyongyang, may have copies of all her emails during her time as Secretary of State, exposing both her and our nation to blackmail.

The FBI and DOJ are giving the appearance of investigating Hillary’s wrongdoings, but giving her exoneration a veneer of an honest investigation takes time. The FBI needs to interview witnesses and give them immunity. They need time to make side deals to destroy evidence. The grand jury needs . . . whoops, forgot: Unlike virtually every other criminal case the DOJ and FBI investigate, they haven’t bothered to impanel a grand jury. Someone needs to write (and edit) an exoneration statement, so it doesn’t get thrown together carelessly at the last minute, after you’ve heard and discarded the evidence. And all of this is a pain in the ass when you keep getting interrupted by having to do all these check-the-box “key” witness interviews.

And all the while all this is going on, no one trusts Hillary. She can’t shake the scandal, despite her trying out a new excuse – usually laughable, as even you admit – on a weekly basis.

Still worse, Hillary is facing a real primary challenge from Bernie the Red, despite the fact that the super-delegates will ensure he can’t possibly win. Still, he’s seriously hurting m’lady’s “inevitability” narrative, especially because young Democrat voters, those with the stars still in their eyes, are almost as bothered as the Deplorables are by Hillary’s email “issues.”

Finally, to pile on the irritants bedeviling inevitability. you learn that Hillary’s Campaign Chairman, John Podesta, fell for a phishing scam and now Wikileaks has all the DNC’s and Podesta’s emails. Who knows what dirty laundry lies at the bottom of that black hole?

So many problems it makes even the most confident head spin. You shake yourself — time to get back to concentrating on pulling this tired old donkey across the finish line. You decide that what you are going to need is an opponent who makes Hillary look like an angel dressed in shining white robes; one that makes her seem an avatar of ethics and purity in comparison.

Impossible? You say, Ha! [Read more…]

Critically important: FISA, the NSA, and the 4th Amendment

January 29, 2018 by Wolf Howling 20 Comments

With FISA and the NSA in the news, learn why abusing them isn’t arcane procedural stuff but is, instead, critically important to American freedom.

Did the Obama administration illegally use its power in multiple ways to access NSA intercepts so that it could gain intelligence on – and kneecap – Trump’s administration? If so, then this is a scandal that dwarfs everything that happened during Watergate and highlights the real danger to our republic flowing from government abuse of NSA’s capabilities.

With luck, we’ll very soon read the House Intelligence Committee’s four-page document summarizing its investigation into alleged FISA abuses and the Trump-Russia collusion. If we’re very lucky, that document will have attached to it the declassified intelligence and court documents supporting its contentions. And just today, Rep. Trey Gowdy teased the contents of the House memo:

If you think your viewers want to know whether or not the dossier was used in [FISA] court proceedings, whether or not it was vetted before it was used, whether or not it’s ever been vetted — if you are interested in who paid for the dossier, if you are interested in Christopher Steele’s relationship with Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, then, yes, you will want the memo to come out.”

“Do you want to know that the Democratic National Committee paid for material that was never vetted, that was included in a court proceeding?” . . . . “Do you want to know whether or not the primary source in these court proceedings had a bias against one candidate? Do you want to know whether or not he said he’d do anything to keep that candidate from becoming president?”

Much of what Rep. Gowdy is referring to centers around NSA intercepts and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, otherwise known as FISA. To understand just how the NSA, FISA, and the 4th Amendment fit together in the drama playing out before us, read on.

Fourth Amendment

To fully appreciate the meaning and purpose behind the 4^th Amendment to the Constitution, one needs to travel back to the American colonies, around 1760. That was when the colonists, who considered themselves staunch British subjects, began to understand that the British government in London was not treating them well at all.

One of the government’s unfair acts was to impose such high taxes on certain commodities that the taxes threatened the entire colonial economy (and made life far more expensive for the British on the mainland). Some American colonists began smuggling those commodities, just as Brits themselves were extensively doing in England of the time.

The government in London responded in 1760 with “writs of assistance.” There will not be a test, but it will help you interpret contemporary events if you understand “writs of assistance.” These writs were open-ended search warrants authorizing a government agent to search private property — anywhere, at anytime — for contraband without ever having to show to a Court that the agent reasonably believed the search would actually yield contraband. Such a “general warrant” was both a threat to British citizens and a profit source for those British agents who used the writs to line their own pockets in what was an incredibly abusive system.

In the 20th century, Director of Stalin’s Secret Police, Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, famously said, “Show me the man and I’ll find the crime.” He could easily have said the same about the mid-18th century British Crown’s systematic abuse of general warrants such as writs of assistance.

This abuse came to a head in London (and was, at the time, a cause célèbre throughout the colonies) when King George III authorized a general warrant against a political opponent, John Wilkes, in the hope that searching Wilkes’ home would produce evidence of something — anything — the Crown could use to pin a crime on Wilkes. ” British agents, having rooted through Wilkes’ private writings, found nothing worse than a truly bawdy poem. They seized the poem and proceeded to create a crime by surreptitiously publishing it as if Wilkes had done so himself – that being a necessary element of the crime of blasphemy in the U.K. of 1760 – and then charging Wilkes with the crime. Wilkes was then expelled from Parliament and fled to France.

When it came to drafting the Bill of Rights, the Founding Fathers remembered well the abuses to which the British government put general warrants and writs of assistance. For over two centuries, the 4th Amendment has protected American citizens from officials seeking to settle scores or obtain power by wrongfully imposing themselves into and onto private property despite having no having probable cause to believe any crime has been committed.

Not only are these searches illegal, but if our society is to remain free, government can never be allowed the power to conduct such unfounded searches. Nor can government be allowed to leverage these illegal searches into weaponizing FISA for political intelligence or political hits. In this regard, I am specifically referring to the successful political hit the FBI conducted on Michael Flynn using FISA intercepts, an outrage of its own that I will address at the end of this post. [Read more…]